Elon Musk Can Fire 75% Twitter Employees In A Single Go; Twitter Says Don’t Believe In Rumors

Twitter reassured staff that there will be no company-wide layoffs which Elon Musk has threatened to do.

Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy Twitter that he planned to get rid of nearly 75% of the company’s 7,500 workers, citing interviews and documents.

This would take down the headcount to just over 2,000.

Management reassures staff

On Thursday evening Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett emailed employees saying the company does not plan for layoffs.

HR staff at the company also told employees that they were not planning for mass layoffs, but documents show otherwise.

Interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show that the staff will suffer massive cuts in the coming months regardless of who owns the company.

Happening no matter who the owner is

The cuts could happen even with the current management which plans to pare the company’s payroll by about $800 million by the end of next year.

This will lead to the departure of nearly a quarter of the workforce.

The sheer number of the cuts can be explained by Twitter’s motivations behind selling to Elon Musk.

The deal would help the firm in major ways by potentially helping its leadership avoid painful announcements that would have demoralized the staff and possibly crippled the service’s ability to combat misinformation, hate speech and spam.

Effect on users as well

It’s not just the employees who will be affected, millions of users will feel the impact as well.

The cuts Musk proposed would put users at risk of hacks and exposure to offensive material such as child pornography.

Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics, said it would be a “cascading effect where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves”.

Challenges Musk could face

The deal is expected to close by Oct. 28 after which Musk would immediately become Twitter’s new owner.

He will face a major challenge of making the long struggling company more profitable.

It never achieved the profit margins or size of other social sites like Meta and Snap.

His plans

He said that dramatically trimming the workforce is the first step to executing a turnaround strategy.

He will then bring in more effective workers and profitable innovations.

One of Musk’s plans is to loosen content moderation standards and to restore the account of former US president Donald Trump.

Sustaining the ad business

Another is to expand on new services that he has claimed could bring in more revenue, such as Twitter Blue which lets users pay to subscribe to exclusive content from powerful figures and influencers.

However this could backfire badly since if a sizable number of people pay to go ad free, the most lucrative part of Twitter’s current ad business could fail.